This volume is devoted to the person and work of Leszek Kolakowski, who died in July 2009. At the turn of the 1940s and 1950s, Leszek Kolakowski belonged to a group of young intellectuals actively supporting on the ideological front and in the University of Warsaw the new political agendas of Marxist provenance introduced in Poland. But already in 1955-56, he came to the fore of a movement of philosophical revisionists radically questioning the validity of these Marxist prescriptions. This resulted in his expulsion from the Communist Party in the early 1960s, then from the University and...

This volume is dedicated to Barbara Skarga her works, profile and biography. It is a unique character in the Polish intellectual life, but also virtually unknown abroad, except a meager milieu of her readership in France. Dubbed -the first Lady of Polish Philosophy- for a good reason, she contributed not only to shape of Polish Philosophy but to the style of public debate, too. The problem areas initiating her philosophy stemmed from the group of scholars called -the Warsaw school of history of Ideas- with its flagship names such as Leszek Kolakowski, Brinislaw Baczko or Andrzej Walicki. On...

This book presents and analyzes specific metaphysical tendencies that were revived within particular branches of French philosophy from the 1930s to the 1960s. Using the examples of the five philosophers active in this period (Louis Lavelle, Ferdinand Alquie, Jean Wahl, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Emmanuel Levinas), who did not belong to or did not form any school of thought, the author attempts to show that the specificity of this non-classical metaphysics could be located in its anti-naturalist, non-substantial, non-objectival, dialectic, critical, non-systematic and pluralist character. The...